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http://www.msnbc.com/news/659869.asp?cp1=1
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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Gunmen kill 4 Western journalists
Killers of group in convoy bound for Kabul claim to be Taliban
By Pamela Constable
THE WASHINGTON POST
PULI-ESTIKHAM, Afghanistan, Nov. 19 — A caravan of eight trucks and
taxis was traveling on a deserted stretch of highway in eastern Afghanistan
at noon today when six turbaned men wielding Kalashnikov rifles descended
from a rocky ridge and ambushed two of the vehicles.
The killings came in an atmosphere of growing lawlessness in eastern
Afghanistan.
THE GUNMEN forced four foreign journalists and an Afghan guide from
the cars, tried to march them into the hills, then stoned the travelers and
shot them dead when they refused, according to two drivers and an interpreter
who fled the scene unharmed.
“I saw them using stones. I heard the sound of Kalashnikovs, three or
four times,” Mohammed Farooq, an interpreter who was in a car carrying two
journalists from the Reuters news agency, said after reaching the city of
Jalalabad, 40 miles to the west. “We drove away fast and escaped.”
The driver of the second car, Ashiqullah, said the gunmen forced his
passengers — an Italian reporter, a Spanish journalist and an Afghan guide —
down to a riverbank and shot them dead after shouting obscenities. He said
the gunmen claimed to be members of the Taliban militia, which fled the
region five days ago.
The slain journalists were Harry Burton, 33, an Australian television
cameraman for Reuters; Azizullah Haidari, also 33, a Pakistani photographer
for Reuters; Julio Fuentes, 46, a journalist from El Mundo newspaper in
Madrid; and Maria Grazia Cutuli, 39, a reporter for Corriere della Serra
newspaper in Milan. The Afghan guide was not identified.
The three news organizations involved confirmed that the four were
missing.
Their reported deaths bring to seven the known number of journalists
killed in the six-week-old war.
GROWING LAWLESSNESS
The killings came in an atmosphere of growing lawlessness in eastern
Afghanistan, where bands of heavily armed militiamen have been occupying and
looting buildings in the past several days, stealing vehicles from
international aid groups and racing through Jalalabad and the surrounding
Nangahar province.
The lawlessness and disorder there and in other parts of the country
present both a challenge and a threat to the hundreds of foreign journalists
covering a conflict involving shifting alliances among the combatants, heavy
U.S.-led attacks on the fleeing Taliban and continuing resistance from the
militia’s foreign fighters. Bandits also are active.
Today’s convoy, which was headed toward Kabul, did not have an armed
escort.
About a dozen other journalists in the convoy, including a reporter
from The Washington Post, escaped unharmed. The first vehicle in the caravan
missed the ambush and reached Kabul safely. Five vehicles following slightly
farther behind fled the site after the passengers spotted the driver of the
Reuters taxi rushing back toward Jalalabad in an empty car and frantically
gesturing for them to follow.
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An armed search party sent by the regional governor in Jalalabad
stopped before reaching the site of the shootings, which took place near the
Puli-Estikham bridge just inside Kabul province. But bus passengers traveling
from Kabul this afternoon said they had seen the corpses of three men and one
woman lying by the highway.
‘DON’T MOVE, GET OUT’
The driver of the Reuters team, Tury Ali, said the gunmen stopped the
car in an isolated spot about halfway between Jalalabad and Kabul, the
capital, 60 miles east. He said they warned him to stop because there was
fighting ahead and the Taliban troops might kill them.
Just then, Ali said, a bus coming from Kabul stopped and its driver
said the road behind him was quiet and clear. “Then I thought they must be
thieves, and I started to go on,” Ali said. “But they said, ‘Don’t move,
get out.””
Ali and Farooq, the interpreter, said the gunmen ordered Burton and
Haidari to walk with them into the hills, but they begged to be set free. The
gunmen started throwing stones and hit one journalist with a rifle butt. Then
they pointed their rifles and started firing. The two Afghans said they drove
away hurriedly and headed toward Jalalabad, hoping to warn the other
journalists.
A few minutes later, another foreign journalist traveling in the car
directly behind the Reuters team said he came upon an abandoned taxi beside
the road but did not see any gunmen or bodies. He said he looked inside and
found a bag with the Reuters logo.
Fuentes and Cutuli, traveling in a taxi just ahead of the Reuters
team, were also stopped by the gunmen; they and their local guide were
ordered out of the car, taken to a river beside the road and shot dead. Their
driver, Ashiqullah, said he was spared after telling the assailants he was
Muslim, and then fleeing toward Jalalabad.
GUNMEN CLAIM TO BE TALIBAN
Ashiqullah said the gunmen, who shouted vulgar threats at his
passengers, claimed to be fighters from the Taliban, which abandoned
Jalalabad on Wednesday without a fight. The Taliban also fled Kabul last week
but is fighting for control of southern Afghanistan, including its stronghold
of Kandahar.
“The people say the Taliban have gone. It is not true. We are still
here,” the driver quoted the gunmen as saying. There have been scattered
reports that Taliban troops are still hiding in remote hills and abandoned
military camps in the region.
But officials and other witnesses said the gunmen appeared to be
highway robbers. Ali said the assailants shouted to him in the Afghan
language of Pashto. Later today, other travelers reported several incidents
in which armed men in the same area had robbed them on the road.
A taxi driver named Zamarai, who reached Jalalabad from Kabul tonight,
said a young boy had waved him down on the highway this afternoon, and that
gunmen appeared immediately afterward. He said he refused to stop but that
the men fired at him, leaving five bullet holes in the taxi.
The governor of Nangahar provinces, Abdul Qadir, told journalists in
Jalalabad tonight that he believed the journalists might have been kidnapped
but not killed. He said the gunmen were robbers rather than terrorists, and
that “thieves collect money and terrorists shoot people.” He said he was
continuing to investigate the incident.
In the five days since the Taliban abandoned the area, political
leaders from rival armed factions have reached a tentative power-sharing
agreement, but they have not been able to effectively secure the region or
prevent the increasing number of incidents of robbery and violence.
‘IT WAS LATE AND DARK’
Sher Shaa, a militia commander sent by Qadir to investigate the
killings after foreign journalists in Jalalabad appealed to him for help,
returned to the city tonight and said his convoy of 30 armed men had stopped
at the provincial border before reaching the site of the shooting, just
inside Kabul province.
“It was late and dark, and we did not have enough forces to go and get
the bodies,” Shaa said. He said bus passengers traveling from Kabul told him
gunmen in the area had stopped them and stolen their money, clothing and
shoes.
The shooting incident occurred in a barren, mountainous no man’s land
that has not been under any effective government control since the withdrawal
of Taliban forces. The closest Northern Alliance militia post is in the town
of Sorobi, about 15 miles west toward Kabul, and there are no armed
checkposts within miles along the highway heading east toward Jalalabad.
“There is no checkpost, and we are not sure who is in control of the
area,” said Mohammed Alam Janna, an aide to Mohammed Zaman Ghan Shareef, one
of the senior Northern Alliance leaders here who has just been named defense
chief for Nangahar province. And Janna, whose troops escorted a convoy of
foreign journalists from Pakistan to Jalalabad Friday, promised to provide
journalists with security for all travel within the province.
Qadir said he had many troops and that they were experienced enough to
control the area. He said he did not want U.S. Special Forces to enter the
province. “We have much soldiers with experience in the mountains. I fought
for 14 years in these mountains. I know every stone. Believe me,” he said,
“I am more upset about this than you.”
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